A scandal has raged this past week in England involving racially insensitive Tweets that landed the racially insensitive Tweeter behind bars. Liam Stacey was targeted and caged because they knew that almost nobody would want to defend him.

Like any white person who does anything that is deemed “racist,” Stacey stands in Himmler’s shadow and elicits a similar amount of public sympathy. In the modern multicultural society, being a “racist” is put on a par with pregnancy. It’s not a question of degree; it’s all or nothing. Unlike pregnancy, you can’t even have an abortion, just a slow, painful course of liberal chemotherapy, with the constant fear that the self-appointed doctors of moral hygiene will say you’re still not cured. Pin the “R” word on somebody and you can forget all that legal crap about the Magna Carta and freedom of speech.

This is what has happened to Stacey, a young man sent to jail for 56 days for making jeering comments on Twitter about the heart attack suffered during a match by black football player Fabrice Muamba.

Liam Stacey’s real crime was being in charge of a Twitter account while under the influence of alcohol. His contrarian stance to the great tabloid-driven outpouring of national sympathy following the incident certainly did not go down well with Judge John Charles. Channeling the media mob’s mood, Charles said, ‘‘I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done.” If public outrage determines prison sentences, why isn’t Tony Blair currently serving life?

But what is the correct, calm, and proportionate response to this kind of stupid behavior? This would depend on what kind of person you are, what kind of person you thought Mr. Stacey was, and the intervening social strata.

Ignoring him may have been in the best interests of the commissariat that is increasingly trying to impose political correctness on the UK, because cases such as this can quickly become polarizing. Bringing Twitter to the legal bench in this way is the equivalent of sifting through the conversations, correspondence, and thoughts of a large proportion of our racially divided society’s population. Is that likely to increase racial harmony?

“Liam Stacey’s real crime was being in charge of a Twitter account while under the influence of alcohol.”

After Stacey made his comments he was taken to task by other Twitter users, a bit like someone turning round in a pub and saying, “Shut up, you idiot!”

But instead of leaving it there—exactly where it should have been left—it came to the attention of the UK’s increasingly plugged-in PC Stasi. The itch, which had already been scratched enough, was then officially cut open with a legal scalpel and probed for signs of moral cancer and ideological heresy.

Back in 1967 William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the Times newspaper, wrote an influential editorial entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?” regarding the prison sentence passed on The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for drug possession. Mogg’s main point was that conservatives in the judiciary who disapproved of the Stones’ lifestyle singled them out to set an example.

“There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man,” Mogg wrote. Jagger’s sentence was later quashed and he got off with a lecture.

Stacey is such a “purely anonymous young man,” but that doesn’t mean he can’t be used as an example. The multiculturalist establishment knows that its immigration and refugee policies have created a society where race is on people’s minds all the time—in effect a racist society.

The costs of this are enormous, as we see in America’s Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. In such societies whenever there is a minor incident where different races are involved the problem is instantly magnified and becomes insoluble.

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In the same way that the 1960s’ Tory judiciary feared marijuana smoke wafting down Carnaby Street turning the nation’s youth into an army of freely copulating hopheads, so today’s multicultural establishment fears the spread of increasing racial consciousness powered by social media on the simmering contradictions of the society they have created.

The Romans knew much more about handling their underclass. They gave them hate-filled arenas, stained with the blood of beasts and men, in which they could jeer and sneer and vent their aggressive passions. In this way peace was maintained among the non-military populations of their vast polyglot empire.

Football used to serve a similar function in working-class British culture by diverting intense tribalist passions away from the nation’s political bloodstream. But as the PC Stasi increasingly polices even football—with chants, songs, and animal noises banned—so we have seen the growth of more politically charged alternatives such as the English Defence League. Is that what they want? I wonder.

I have no wish to defend Stacey. The fact that I called him a “cockroach” in the title should make that abundantly clear. For all I know, he may be a perfectly normal working-class kid who said the wrong thing at the wrong time, or he might be a creep. We have already become better acquainted with him than any of us deserves.

Defending him, however, would simply have narrowed the focus down to the cockroach. People should be looking at the wheel and wondering why so much pressure is being brought to crush someone for such a trivial incident.

The most surprising news story in recent weeks was that of Emma West, a young lady of the type sneeringly referred to as “chav” (white working class, not fully trained in multicultural etiquette) who fearlessly shouted her opinions to a tram-loaded slice of multicultural London.

The incident itself was not so remarkable. But the fact that this clip, filmed and YouTubed by a non-chav (a blonde who uses a black avatar on her Twitter account) went on to score millions of hits was remarkable indeed.

Equally noteworthy was the heavy-handed way the authorities dealt with the case: West was imprisoned and her children taken into care.

A few days later a gang of female Somali racists who were filmed stamping on a white girl’s head while shouting “Kill the white slag” were released with a tut-tut and a judge’s apology for allowing alcohol to exist in the UK’s remaining non-Sharia zones.

“Women start revolutions because they are more emotionally driven than males.”

Emma West gave us a fleeting glimpse of women’s revolutionary power, a force that should never be underestimated and something of which Britain’s multicultural dictatorship seems cognizant. It was stupid of them to allow the Somali head-stomping racists off so lightly in the wake of the West case, but that gang attack was not revolutionary in nature and comprised no danger to the establishment. But Ms. West’s verbal tirade, despite its grammatical failings, was both revolutionary and dangerous.

Raw female passion has always provided the necessary impetus in past revolutions. The Women’s March on Versailles in 1789 ushered in the French Revolution’s truly revolutionary—as opposed to reformist—period.

Feminist accounts of the Russian Revolution tend to focus on the few educated women who made tea for the creeps who later presided over the genocide of tens of millions of Russians. But in the actual overthrow of Tsarist power it was the common women in the street fearlessly facing up to the Tsarist troops’ bayonets who tipped the balance.

Women start revolutions because they are more emotionally driven than males. And as the weaker sex, they learn to verbally bully men into submission because most of them are in relationships (i.e., prolonged arguments punctuated by bouts of shagging) with creatures that could easily snap their necks like chickens.

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Men are wonderfully rational. They can find 1,001 reasons why the status quo stinks, but their rationality perpetually positions them on the wrong side of action.

Riding along in Emma West’s tram was probably at least one white man who felt similarly irritated and may have even suffered the same sort of provocation that perhaps sent Ms. West on her tirade. But at the last moment, reason’s placating tones kicked in: “I’ll get off in a couple of stops” or “There’s at least six of them—they’ll kill me” or, more pathetically, “I bloody well will say something in the Daily Mail comment box next time.” Heck, the dude might even have made up his mind to send money to the now-ineffective BNP to help pay off Nick Griffin’s legal debts.

No, to get things rolling you need the volatile chicks. The women can’t do it on their own, but once they flare up, men have a chance of losing that little bit of reason that prevents them from acting.

Female rage spearheaded Britain’s first and proportionally bloodiest revolution in 61 AD. Faced by the militarily hyper-efficient Roman legions, British men made the common-sense decision to let the Romans get on with their road-building, taxation, and emperor worship. The male Britons preferred to live the quiet life, watching whatever their version of Sky Sports was. Prasutagus, leader of the Iceni, even made the eminently sensible decision to curry favor with the new overlords by leaving them a half share in his kingdom when he died.

Even when the Romans confiscated the whole lot, the British men simply combed their long beards and polished their belt buckles. Pissed-off but still eminently rational, they stared off into the distance, perhaps to a remote future when anger could be harmlessly expressed on the Internet.

Things only got rolling when Prasutagus’s widow, the fearless and possibly menopausal Boadicea, gave the Roman oppressors an earload of the ancient British equivalent of “D’y’know what? Sort out your own countries. Don’t come and do mine. Britain is nothing now. Britain is fuck all. My Britain is fuck all now. Britain is fuck all. My Britain is fuck all!”

As they did with Emma West, those in power responded fiercely. They flogged Boadicea and raped her daughters, but this outrage suspended male rationality long enough for the revolution to commence.

]]>Articles by Colin LiddellRise of the Euro-Reichtag:takimag.com,2011:article/1.120452011-11-22T04:01:40Z2011-11-22T04:35:42ZColin Liddellcbliddell@googlemail.com

Back in the 1940s the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht had to bomb and invade countries to prove das Herrenvolk’s superiority over Europe’s lesser peoples. Now, thanks to those lesser nations’ poor housekeeping and the German economy’s turbo-charging through the euro’s export opportunities, Germans merely have to sit back and refuse to buy up sovereign debt to see the rest of Europe fall at their feet.

The eurozone’s countries have no option but to knuckle under and “act German” by making the kind of “neither guns nor butter” cuts required to survive in anything approaching their present economic level.

The only alternative is the euro’s collapse, and nobody (important) wants that, as demonstrated by the quickness with which the Greek elite abandoned plans for a referendum and the Italians agreed to a non-democratic administration of “technocrats” (code for Italians who behave like Germans).

On Sunday, in an achievement that even eluded Hitler during an earlier period of German ascendancy, the Spanish fell in line and voted in a cost-cutting center-right government.

“Apart from a few squeaks of protest, most of the continent seems cowed and ready to lick the German jackboot.”

Soon, unquestioned German power—with the help of the Vichy French under the compliant Sarkozy—will stretch from the Straits of Gibraltar to Stettin on the Baltic, with German voters’ reluctance to bail out the rest of Europe trumping the Greek, Italian, Spanish, Irish, and other Untermenschen’s aspirations to have cozy public-sector jobs, plump early retirement, and plenty of sweet welfare.

But as in that earlier period of Teutonic ascendancy, only one brave island nation and its lion-hearted leader, David William Donald Cameron, stand in the way of Europe sliding into a dark age of ever greater German fiscal domination and undemocratic political union.

Realizing that Britain is economically too weak to stand in the German juggernaut’s way, Cameron has sent out the signal to Europe’s “resistance movements” (mainly stroppy Greek rioters and tax-dodgers) to rise up and demand that the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank buy up European sovereign debt so that the political largesse and good times can keep on rolling—effectively advocating a policy he refuses to implement at home. Unfortunately, apart from a few squeaks of protest, most of the continent seems cowed and ready to lick the German jackboot.

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Flying over Berlin on a recent visit the British leader bravely dropped a few ineffectual bombs, telling the German Führer Frau Merkel that “All the institutions of the eurozone have to stand behind and back and do what is necessary to defend it,” meaning that the European Central Bank, backed by German taxpayers, should foot the bill for years of other governments’ overspending back during fiscal freedom’s heady days.

Angered by this brave sortie to disrupt their economic overlordship, the Germans have now decided to turn their big guns directly on the plucky little island that has so often thwarted their past ambitions.

German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble quickly countered, saying it was only a matter of time before Britain itself was crushed under the mighty German euro’s heel.

“One day the whole of Europe will have a single currency and perhaps it will happen more quickly than many people on the British island think,” he told a “mass rally” of staff from the DPA news agency while unveiling a fiendish economic weapon designed to destroy the British economy. This latter-day economic equivalent of the V-2 rockets is a financial-transaction tax designed, like its predecessors, to bring London to its knees.

Former Prime Minister John Major described this terrorist weapon as “a heat-seeking missile aimed at the City of London.”

For the time being Cameron can bravely fight on and continue to blame any domestic economic problems on the austerity regime the German Fourth Reich has imposed throughout Europe, but with the economic crisis forcing Europe into even greater union under its only credible major economy’s auspices, Britain stands alone once again with little hope of the help it received in 1941, when the Soviet Union and the USA joined the struggle.

Meanwhile the Fifth Column go about their perfidious work trying to undermine our Great Leader. The shadow Foreign Secretary from the Labour Party Douglas Alexander said, “David Cameron is leaving Berlin just as isolated as he was when he arrived….That is a genuine concern for those of us who want Britain to be a strong and, indeed, leading voice in trying to find a way forward,” by which, of course, he meant total surrender to a Quisling Europhile government.

]]>Articles by Colin LiddellTen Great Things About the Japanesetag:takimag.com,2011:article/1.117102011-06-23T04:00:15Z2011-06-22T08:11:17ZColin Liddellcbliddell@googlemail.com

People around the world were deeply impressed by the manner in which the Japanese handled the big quake earlier this year. By “handled,” they of course mean “didn’t run around in marauding packs looting and shooting at each other.” It’s impressive stuff if you experienced Hurricane Katrina or Haiti’s 2010 quake, but it’s taken for granted if you live in Japan as I do. With apologies to Taki’s resident list-maker Gavin McInnes, here are ten more things about the Japanese that are far more impressive than calmly waiting for food aid and blankets:

1. THEY COMBINE MULTICULTURALISM WITH MONORACIALISM
While Western countries have to permanently upset their ethnic balance and raise the specter of future genocidal civil wars to get a bit of decent ethnic cuisine or exotic dance classes, the Japanese manage to import most of the world’s culture without importing most of the world’s people. This means they don’t have to develop the sort of liberal totalitarianism and thought-crime legislation that sad little countries such as England and Canada do, which, because they are increasingly multiracial, are increasingly monocultural—the monoculture being state fascism.

“The Japanese manage to import most of the world’s culture without importing most of the world’s people.”

2. THEY PAY MONEY TO SPEAK ENGLISH TO YOU
A definite upside of Japanese monoracialism is that when you actually get here, there are plenty of people who are willing to pay good money just to hear you speak English and to ask you dumb questions. Over the years I’ve spent here, the top five questions I’ve fielded have been: “When did you come to Japan?”...“Can you use chopsticks?”...“Do you like Japanese food?”...“Where are you from?”...and…“Can I give you another erotic massage?”

3. THEY ONLY ACCEPT REFUGEES FROM FIRST WORLD COUNTRIES
While most Western countries throw open their borders every time there’s a public flogging/vaginal circumcision/paper-clip shortage in the Third World, the Japanese do their bit for the planet’s displaced by only accepting refugees from First World countries such as America. Japan is home to an estimated 88,000 US citizens. Since most of them are Democrats, geek boys, and liberal-arts graduates, this provides a valuable service to Americans by removing what would otherwise be a highly unproductive and unsightly segment of their population.

4. IF YOU TIP THEM, THEY WILL RUN AFTER YOU AND FORCE YOU TO TAKE IT BACK
In addition to having the world’s best service—another thing you unfortunately start taking for granted after a few years—the Japanese also hate being tipped. If you do this, expect the waiting staff or taxi driver to pursue you and force you take back your brown coins by threatening ritual suicide. If you must insult them, it’s far kinder to make a disparaging remark about the emperor’s buck teeth and comically thick bifocals.

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5. SAMUEL SMILES’S BOOK SELF-HELP IS STILL ON THE BESTSELLERS LIST
While Western culture is dominated by intellectual midgets such as Germaine Greer, Richard Dawkins, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the Japanese still drink regularly from the true fountains of wisdom—mainly books by dead white guys plus Confucius.

6. THEY APPRECIATE OUR CULTURE MORE THAN WE DO
Western museums feel compelled to organize exhibitions of Pygmy dung sculpture or Cambodian straw-weaving in order to balance the “hideous whiteness” of Renaissance art, Baroque sculpture, or French Impressionism. The Japanese have no such hang-ups. Alongside their own culture, “hideous whiteness” is what they crave most. Any exhibition by a well-known Western artist or movement will have them forming lengthy queues keen to pay $15 entrance fees for weeks on end.

7. THEY ESTABLISH INTERNATIONAL PEACE BY MAKING PAPER CRANES
While Western nations try to end war, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation by bombing and invading the wrong countries, the Japanese have a much better system: They get school kids to make origami paper cranes, then hang them by the thousands in temples, shrines, and at the Hiroshima Peace Monument. OK, it doesn’t solve anything, either, but at least a sheet of origami paper costs a lot less than a cruise missile.

8. THEIR WOMEN GIVE EACH OTHER HANDY MAKEUP TIPS ON THE TRAIN
Unlike Western women, who jealously guard their makeup secrets by only applying them in the boudoir, many Japanese ladies now do all their makeup on the train. This makes for the easy transference of beauty technology, allowing for a far lovelier female contingent than in the dyke-’n’-slut-infested West.

9. THEY DO MOST OF THEIR VOMITING WHEN THERE ARE PLENTY OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS FALLING TO COVER IT UP
The Japanese are not known for their ability to hold their liquor, with public vomiting a frequent and unfortunate consequence. But almost as if to support Christian notions of “intelligent design,” the main outdoor drinking season coincides perfectly with the descent of the cherry blossoms, as fluttering pink petals decorously cover up alcohol-laden pink puddles. Everything looks lovely, but be careful where you sit.

10. THEY STILL SCARE THE CHINESE
With America likely to turn into a low-IQ, debt-ridden, Third World slum ripe for conquest and colonization within the next couple of decades, perhaps the greatest thing about the Japanese is that the Chinese still have a deep residual fear of them. While Westerners have always touted the idea of China as a sleeping giant, less well-known is the secret Chinese terror of stirring up the Japanese hornet’s nest. As long as this fear reflex remains in place, 21st-century China will always be wary about crossing the Pacific to take advantage of the easy pickings on the other side.

When searching for Islamic terrorists in England, avoid the mosques and head straight to the universities. Most of Britain’s homegrown terrorists get the all-important leg-up to “exploding beardie” status at the nation’s supposedly secular universities. Prime Minister David Cameron reluctantly recognized as much earlier this year when he talked about stopping terrorist groups from recruiting Muslims in universities.

The universities are none too pleased with being placed on a par with al-Qaeda training camps in the Yemen Desert, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. As Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, pointed out in The Daily Telegraph, virtually every major Islamist terrorist attack in Britain has been led by university students or recent graduates.

“Becoming ‘radicalized’—whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad—is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement.”

But rather than admit they have a problem, university authorities prefer warm, soft, comfortable denial. Two years ago, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a recent graduate from University College London, was arrested for attempting to use his explosive underwear to blow up an American passenger jet with 289 people on board. UCL went through the motions of an internal inquiry and reassuringly concluded, “there was no evidence to suggest either that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was radicalised while a student at UCL, or that conditions at UCL during that time or subsequently were conducive to the radicalisation of students.”

The known facts paint a different picture. Abdulmutallab was president of the school’s Islamic Society from 2006-07. During this time the group honed their theological skills via martial-arts training, paintballing, and attending juicy-sounding lectures such as “Jihad v Terrorism.” Given his subsequent attempt to blow up an airplane with his underpants, all these activities were clear evidence that UCL had a bad apple in their midst. Unfortunately for the university pollyannas, Abdulmutallab was no one-off. Since 2006, at least four presidents of London student Islamic societies have faced terrorist charges.

After researching Hezbollah martyrs, economist Alan Krueger concluded that “terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high income families.” This pattern seems to hold good in other studies, and it was certainly true in the case of Abdulmutallab, who comes from a privileged Nigerian background.

There’s no intrinsic reason why having more money should make someone more likely to be a terrorist. Rather, it is the correlation between middle-class or high-income families and full-time higher education. As anyone who has been a university student in the UK in the last 40 years can testify, campus life is inherently radicalizing.

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During my time at university in the late 1980s, the most obvious forms of radicalization were Marxism, anarchism, feminism, and animal lib. Despite in many ways being the most radical of the lot, fascism never made much headway. What made all this fashionable radicalism more baffling was that most of the students affected by it were from plush, middle-class backgrounds.

According to classical Marxist theory, I, as the son of an automobile-production engineer thrown out of work by Thatcher’s economic restructuring, should have been the most radical of students. Yet there I was in the varsity library reading all the dust-covered tomes that the leftist academics who taught our courses had left off the reading lists for the last 30 years. There I was, propping up the student union bar telling the usual gaggle of plummy-voiced Marxists that the state wasn’t going to wither away with money becoming redundant while we all went around happily doing odd jobs for each other. Perhaps preserving a modicum of economic reality against the bourgeois Bolshies’ meditative myopia was my little way of fighting the class war.

Becoming “radicalized”—whether your bearded prophet happens to be Marx or Muhammad—is essentially code for having too much time on your hands and a sense of smug entitlement. This is the essence of university life. With three years of sleeping late, anything seems possible.

Rather than subjecting students to intellectual rigor, typical academic life suspends the need to think about things in any meaningful way. When your main cerebral challenges are to plagiarize essays off the Internet, guilt-trip your “bourgeois” parents into subsidizing your leisurely lifestyle, and think up a witty slogan for your next picket sign, most of the wheels with which the human brain is furnished go unturned. It is any wonder that delusional pipe dreams take root?

Under these conditions, scientific observation reveals that middle-class white kids will run around sporting Che Guevara T-shirts, keffiyehs, or Trotskyist trench coats for a couple of years, often adorned with silly badges. They may even dare to experiment with radical communistic lifestyles such as agreeing to share the margarine and/or dish soap with flatmates. However, once studenthood’s cocoon is removed, they will invariably revert back to their parents’ mindset. With people of an Islamic cultural background the consequences may be more dramatic, as Abdulmutallab and his exploding underpants show.

So what is to be done? Professor Anthony Glees suggests getting the universities to teach their students by “working with them, knowing them, guiding them and ensuring that they keep to the basic values which have made this country a decent mature democracy.”

This kind of imprecise rhetoric and reliance on airy assumptions is a sure sign that nothing will ever be done. What would work, however, would be to change university education from the three-year radicalization holiday it has become to something more like vocational night school. Those who wish to better their prospects or who simply have an unquenchable thirst for esoteric knowledge could do courses in the evenings or on weekends after they have finished their real job. The best cure for student radicalism is a normal working life. Terrorism has no chance against that.

In sporting terms, America is very much an island with its own quaint customs. For this reason the etymologically unsound American version of “football”—the world’s most popular sport—mainly consists of throwing a non-spherical object by hand while swathed in body armor. American “soccer” superficially resembles football, with the added dimension of anxious US “soccer moms” who push their youngsters into a sport whose reliance on large open spaces minimizes participation by “ghetto kids.”

Despite the similarities, American soccer and football as it is played in the rest of the world are two entirely different sports. In American soccer, tribalism consists of keeping unwanted tribes out of soccer altogether. But the international version of football is innately tribal, with almost every major city divided into rival fan groups whose main purpose in life seems to be baiting, demeaning, and belittling their rivals.

This was demonstrated in the recent “friendly” match played in London between Scotland and Brazil, where once again tribalism and race leaped to the fore.

“Around the world, throwing a banana onto a football pitch is edible semantic shorthand for insinuating an opponent’s affinity with apes.”

A Scottish dye worker named Tom Donohue first brought the game to Brazil back in 1894. Brazil would rise to preeminence among the developed footballing nations, winning five World Cups. But with a population of nearly 200 million, their success is based on a much larger talent pool than its main rivals: Germany (81 million), Italy (60 million), and Argentina (40 million).

The recent game in London ended in a 2-0 victory for Brazil, with their teenage mulatto striker Neymar netting both goals against the Scots while apparently balancing a ferret on his head. Brazil’s brilliance is not based on their much-touted funky ethnic mishmash but simply on vast numbers of players from which to choose. Here as elsewhere, demographics are destiny.

As is common in football, the actual game—a dull victory with the favorite overcoming a cautious and defensive underdog—was overshadowed by non-footballing events. After the final whistle, Neymar complained that he had been jeered at throughout the game and that someone had thrown a banana onto the pitch.

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Around the world, throwing a banana onto a football pitch is edible semantic shorthand for insinuating an opponent’s affinity with apes. The Scots, who pride themselves on their hirsute, eccentrically dressed, but extremely well-behaved fans—in contrast to the neighboring English, who are notorious for male-pattern baldness and hooliganism—instantly made efforts to distance themselves from the racist banana. This led to equally racist claims that an Englishman was responsible and, more humorously, that no self-respecting Scot would let a piece of fruit anywhere near his body.

One of the best examples of football’s tribalism is Glasgow, where Rangers FC draws its support from the city’s monarchist Protestant elements, while Celtic FC attracts the Catholics and republicans. Many Celtic fans are also descendants of Irish immigrants who identify with Sinn Fein and the IRA, while the Rangers faithful root for Ulster’s loyalist paramilitaries. Because of perceived similarities between the IRA and groups such as the PLO, Celtic fans took to waving Palestinian flags at their matches a few years ago. In a ridiculous tit-for-tat, Rangers fans responded by flaunting Israeli banners.

Americans are sure to find this all very bewildering, but a trawl around the world’s soccer grounds will only reinforce their culture shock, turning up instances of monkey chanting, Nazi salutes, Holocaust references (used against teams suspected of having Jewish fans), banners emblazoned with “Death to Arabs,” and celebrations of disasters such as the 1958 airplane crash that killed half of the Manchester United team.

The world’s footballing grounds might appear to be dark and disturbing places unless you have faith in group catharsis and realize that most people are unlikely to behave in their daily lives the way they chant in stadiums. Indeed, stopping such behavior at the stadium might cause it to emerge in their daily lives.

Ostentatiously taunting the opposition is all part of the game and should not be taken too seriously. The same Chelsea supporters who once chanted “Hitler’s not dead, he’s the leader of the Shed” (Chelsea’s ground) were quite happy when Roman Abramovich took over the club and spent a fortune on top players. Likewise, the same supporters who throw bananas at their opponent’s “darkie” players worship their own sable geniuses when they score. Racism is not always racism, unless you’re a soccer mom moving heaven and Earth to stop junior from getting hooked on the NBA.

]]>Articles by Colin LiddellHercules in the Deserttag:takimag.com,2011:article/1.114912011-03-23T04:01:41Z2011-03-22T10:08:42ZColin Liddellcbliddell@googlemail.com

Antaeus by William Blake

Antaeus was a Libyan giant whose strength appeared invincible. One day he challenged the mighty Hercules to a wrestling match. Each time Antaeus was thrown to the ground, he rose again stronger than before. Hercules realized that his strength came from his mother Gaia, the Earth, so he held the giant aloft until his strength drained away and finally killed him.

Once again battle is joined on Libya’s sands, and the question now is which one is Antaeus and which is Hercules. Whose strength will ultimately drain away and be defeated, and who will triumph? Can Antaeus actually win this time?

Perhaps the more classically educated among our Western leaders—are there any left?—think they are effectively holding Gaddafi aloft and draining him of his strength by imposing their no-fly zone and shooting up armored columns that cross invisible red lines. Possibly they expect their flash of high-tech, rocket-powered Herculean strength to impress these simple desert people and so deprive the Libyan leader of the support he still draws from a considerable portion of them. The West’s desired end game is probably a replay of the Northern Alliance kicking out the Taliban, little realizing, through the welter of intelligence reports, the subtle differences between one end of the Islamic world and the other.

“It seems that in this battle it is the West that is now being held aloft with its strength slowly ebbing away.”

It seems more likely that the Western Hercules has merely succeeded in throwing Antaeus to the ground. The past couple of weeks have shown that the Libyan leader still has plenty of military power and would have soon ended this civil war if the West had sat on its thumbs a little while longer. Despite the splendor of its armaments, the West is constrained in what it can do. Already the US and its cronies look bad for declaring war on Gaddafi on the pretext that he is harming his own people while they ignore similar brutalities carried out by Western allies in Bahrain and Yemen.

To actually employ the firepower required to topple Gaddafi might make this ill-judged intervention look even worse. A few demolished buildings surrounded by wailing civilians or a busload of children blown to smithereens because some in-flight computer decided it resembled a tank could easily drain off the strength the Western giant draws from its public’s half-baked notion that it is merely involved in a bit of Good Samaritan, high-altitude, pinpoint bombing.

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Arab perceptions of the West’s arrogance and aggression and the suspicion that the real agenda may simply be to punish Gaddafi on behalf of Israel rather than to liberate Libyans will ensure that Gaddafi finds being thrown to the ground by the Western Hercules an empowering experience.

In order to destroy this Antaeus, the West has to find some way to raise him aloft and slowly choke the life out of him. Ironically this was exactly what they were doing when the likes of Tony Blair went over to Tripoli to cozy up to the Gaddafis and sign oil deals and contracts for riot-control gear. Encouraging the kind of cultural and business links that thawing hard-line tyrannies find destabilizing, this also sent out the message that the Lion of the Desert with his Little Green Book of Bedouin wisdom and socialist platitudes was fast becoming a bloated Mubarak with the usual litter of designer-suited offspring grunting around Europe’s fleshpots.

Unfortunately, spurred on by a wish to emulate the neighbors, the rebels got their timing wrong and struck when the tyrant still had enough tribal and other loyalties to hang on and bounce back. Now the only thing left for the West is to keep throwing Gaddafi harmlessly to the ground. Even physically killing him, perhaps with one of those drones that seem particularly attracted to large noisy Islamic weddings, might not work. Another Herculean myth springs to mind—the Hydra and its ability to generate new heads. Turning an old man with sons to succeed him into a martyr is never a wise policy unless you’re prepared to cauterize every stump.

It seems that in this battle it is the West that is now being “held aloft” with its strength slowly ebbing away. This is almost literally true as NATO pilots fly high over a desert where democracy’s “nation-building” shoots fail to sprout. The Benghazi enclave may survive for a few months under the protective umbrella of Western carpet bombs and armor-piercing missiles, and we could even see a new state à la South Sudan, but the Gaddafis are not likely to forget and forgive. They’ll do their work at night and with knives if need be. There’s a proverb somewhere that says, “If you anger a Bedouin, best kill him.” A West without this kind of killer instinct should best avoid playing at Hercules.